information for Student Affairs staff

All websites on studentaffairs.psu.edu are in a degraded state and experiencing slowness affecting logins and page loading. IT staff are investigating. Since the sites are slow but functional, we will postpone any server restarts until 5pm. We will update as we learn new information or remedy the issue.

Between Saturday, July 11, 2015 9am – Sunday, July 12, 2015 5pm, web services on SAS4 and SAS3080 will be intermittently down in order to upgrade from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2012. This large maintenance window is necessary to complete a major project. You will see from the list below that Student Affairs has many websites and most listed are configured with databases.

The reason for this maintenance window is that Windows Server 2003 is rapidly approaching End of Life (July 15, 2015), and Student Affairs IT personnel have been working fervently to prepare for the upgrade of the affected systems.

The services impacted are as follows:

Student Affairs main public website (studentaffairs.psu.edu, also www.sa.psu.edu)

The networking equipment replacements were completed Tuesday afternoon, Dec 30. The server updates are still being applied. They are about 60% complete. Testing will now begin on the servers that have been updated.

From 8am-5pm on December 29-30, networking services in Boucke, HUB-Robeson Center and the Bank of America Career Services will be intermittently down in order to replace networking equipment. Nine 48-port switches will be installed to replaced out-of-warranty, end-of-life equipment. These installations are expected to be finished by December 30, with December 31 as an optional day if issues are encountered.

Also, during this timeframe, SAIT will be performing server maintenance which will involve approximately 150 servers. These servers will not impact email services (UCS) since that service is handled by ITS. Depending on complexity of the maintenance, this service window may extend itself into if not through December 31st. SAIT will test for connectivity after the work is completed. There are systems we cannot test beyond ensuring connection success:

RADLion

QS/1

Orchard/Harvest

Point and Click

Titanium

Users of these specific systems will be able to test beyond connectivity when they return to work or remotely. Problems should be reported to saithelp@psu.edu.